CHOICES (Completed)

FALLEN

And for the first time in my life, I wanted to talk to someone.

I wanted to know him, be with him.”

Silent tears roll down my cheeks and I ruffle Trevor’s hair, making sure my voice doesn’t wake him up.

“For the Annual Concert, we sang Falling in Love together. That’s how we became friends. And then – really close friends. He would skip food sometimes and then faint the way he did, that day. He never told me the problem, but now I think I know, it was because he was alone. Troubled. Unloved.

He would be there every time I missed mom, and he used to have problems with his parents. We would talk, and eventually he got closer to them. I don’t know, wha-

We would play guitar together, and get chocolates, and run on fields. We were having a blast. I had never been happier. He was the first and only, after Dad.”

My voice chokes and I close my eyes momentarily. Every memory revolves around me, enveloping me in a happy bubble. I have had so much with him.

And when we sang the song one day, Falling in Love again, casually jamming, he had taken me in an embrace, dancing lightly to the music.

I had never felt the way I had, then. And when I had looked into his eyes, looking at me, I had known for the first time, how love felt like.

“I knew I had fallen for him. And somehow I thought that maybe he had too. So the second year, I confessed to him. In front of the whole school. And I sang Falling in Love to him.”

I sniff and go on with caressing Trevor’s hair. I take a minute and then continue.

Music had always been… our thing. And ‘Falling in Love’, had been our ‘strings attached’.

I remember all the three times I had with the song, and feeling all kinds of different things, each time. Though all for him, and with him.

“He blew me off. Rejected me. He said I was pathetic and delusional to even think that he would choose me. He insulted… and ridiculed me in front of the whole school.

And he enjoyed it. I don’t know what had happened to him that day. He just wasn’t Hardin. He could have just said no, and got over with it, but he- he had this hatred, and anger, some kind of frustration-“

I cry out desperately, to no one in particular and shudder to rethink all of that. I still had moments of that day trapped within me. Which had held on to me like a hydra, sucking life out of me.

“-and every time I think of that day, I would question just how could I fail to see Hardin?To see him as he was? I never knew why he did, what he did. But, I accepted my reality after a while. I accepted that I wasn’t enough.”

I feel my face getting warmer and moistened due to the rolling of tears.

I continue to look out, to nothing in particular, but just a year old myself, when my emotions and I together, had made some bad choices.

I so desperately wish to erase it all from my life like a wrong calculation on my math notebook. I so desperate wish to never have expressed anything, and saved myself a world of pain.

“I stood there crying, and he told me to never remind him of my worthless existence by showing him his face again. I – broke.